A Blues Odyssey

Michael Bloomfield’s life was a great story waiting to be told, and David Dann has done it considerable justice. His passion for his subject and the depth of his research are extraordinary (leading to an equally extraordinary length of the tome— 776 pages.) He positions Bloomfield as something of a neglected genius, whose meretricious choices, refusal to be co-opted by the burgeoning pop industry, excessive drug use, and early death relegated him to the margins of rock n’ roll history.

This book is foremost about music, but it’s also about mental illness. Bloomfield suffered his whole adult life from some combination of anxiety, manic depression, narcissism, and insomnia, and it ultimately killed him. Proper diagnosis and treatment seemed elusive as Bloomfield self-medicated with sleeping pills, heroin, and alcohol. However, even the best medical advice may not have saved him, as he was hell-bent on self-destruction.

As someone intimately familiar with the back acres of guitar history, I was pleased to find myself the target audience of Dann’s protean effort. Though I was aware of the bare outlines of the guitarist’s best-known moments, playing with Dylan on Like a Rolling Stone, leading The Electric Flag, and playing in the first Paul Butterfield Band, I knew all too little about Bloomfield’s odyssey. Dann painstakingly chronicles his brief thirty-seven years in minute detail. Contemporaries such as Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana became household names, and Dann believes Bloomers, as his friends called him, deserves to be part of that pantheon. He claims Bloomfield as the first real rock guitarist to solo (as opposed to just playing chords), someone who inspired folk-rock and psychedelic rock, laid the groundwork for jazz fusion, and started the first rock band with a horn section.

Some of this is disputable, but it may not matter. Bloomfield’s wild exploits are a terrific tale, a mirror for the cultural revolutions of the time. Dann methodically sets his story amidst momentous events such the Monterey Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix’s arrival as Jimmy James in New York City, Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival, and innumerable societal upheavals small and large. In the author’s hands the era leaps to life.

Mike Bloomfield was first and foremost an excellent blues guitarist. The book opens with vignettes of him sneaking off from his rich parents’ mansion north of Chicago to the city’s poor South Side where he soaked in the sounds of blues masters such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Michael didn’t just worship these giants from the back of the room; he befriended them and as a teenager began to join them onstage. His idols apparently more than tolerated him, they appreciated and encouraged him. It was no simple thing to cross the lines of class and race in the urban geography of the late 1950’s. It took heart and guts. Bloomfield’s hunger for this music was bottomless, and his musical gifts shine most brightly when he plays the music of this lineage — electrified Chicago blues. He also mastered the acoustic ragtime, stomps, and novelty tunes of the previous era, written by country folk such as Josh White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tampa Red, and Son House. Bloomfield was one of the first white rock guitarists who built his sound firmly upon this rock. As Dann relates it, dramatizing a meeting that occurred in Chicago in 1963, Bob Dylan himself thought he was “about the best damn guitar player I ever heard,” and was amazed at the breadth of Bloomfield’s historical chops. Dylan, an authority on every aspect of American roots music, found a kindred spirit, and a year later hired him on his groundbreaking record, Highway 61 Revisited (1965).

To understand Bloomfield’s impact, you must imagine those few years, ‘63 to ‘66, when rock guitar music was birthed. Specifically, you have to see the world before...